🚂 Murder on the Orient Express (2017)

A mystery that derails before the final stop


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🎬 Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

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📖 Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Agatha Christie’s classic novel gets another lavish adaptation, this time with Kenneth Branagh directing and starring as Hercule Poirot — the man with the world’s most famous mustache. The setup is legendary: a murder happens on a luxury train stranded in the snowy mountains, and everyone on board is a suspect.

On paper, it should be the ultimate whodunit. In execution? It’s a beautiful, slow-moving piece that builds tension… and then throws it all away with an ending that doesn’t work.


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👥 Character Rundown

Hercule Poirot (Kenneth Branagh): The obsessive detective with the giant mustache. He’s eccentric, witty, and clearly passionate about solving mysteries — Branagh plays him like he’s auditioning for “theatrical detective of the year.” Honestly, Poirot is the best part of the movie.

The Suspects: Daisy Ridley, Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny Depp, Willem Dafoe, Judi Dench — a stacked cast. And yet, most of them feel wasted, existing only to sit in a carriage and look shifty until Poirot questions them.


The ensemble is massive, but they don’t get enough time to breathe. It’s more “cameos on a train” than characters we actually care about.


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⏳ Pacing / Episode Flow

The movie is slow. That isn’t automatically bad — plenty of slow-burn mysteries work — but the problem here is that the slow pace builds toward a conclusion that fizzles. It’s like waiting two hours for a magician to pull a rabbit out of a hat, only for him to shrug and say, “Eh, the rabbit’s gone. Show’s over.”


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✅ Pros

The snowy landscapes and train visuals are stunning. The cinematography is gorgeous — it feels like a big-budget Christie tale.

Branagh’s Poirot is eccentric but entertaining, a larger-than-life detective who anchors the whole thing.

Production design nails the 1930s luxury aesthetic.



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❌ Cons

The ensemble cast is wasted. They barely get to do anything beyond answering questions.

The mystery is predictable if you know the book, but even if you don’t, the “everyone did it” twist lands flat.

Poirot’s decision to just let everyone walk free? Absurd. That’s not how justice works. Murder is still murder, even if the victim was evil.

It feels like a slow burn that builds to… nothing. The atmosphere is all dressed up with nowhere to go.



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💭 Final Thoughts

I’ll be blunt: this isn’t my favorite Christie adaptation — not even close. It’s stylish but hollow, like a snow globe: pretty to look at, but shake it and there’s not much inside. The pacing is already slow, which I could forgive if the payoff was sharp. But instead, we get an ending where Poirot essentially shrugs and lets the murderers go because, “Well, the guy they killed was bad.”

Sorry, no. That’s not how a murder mystery works. Just because the victim was scum doesn’t erase the fact that you still killed him. It turns the film’s moral core into mush and leaves the audience with a sense of, “Wait… so that’s it?”

It doesn’t help that I didn’t truly latch onto this franchise until A Haunting in Venice. That’s telling — the third installment finally clicked for me. But the first two? Meh.


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⭐ Rating

5/10 — Gorgeous visuals and strong Poirot performance can’t make up for a hollow mystery with a frustrating conclusion.


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⚠️ Spoiler Warning

Alright, let’s hop into the snow-dusted carriage and pick apart why this ending derailed everything.


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🔎 Spoilers

The victim is Ratchett (Johnny Depp), a criminal hiding under a new identity. He’s murdered during the night, stabbed multiple times. Poirot interviews every passenger and slowly unravels that — shocker — they all did it. Every single person on the train had a reason, tied to Ratchett’s dark past involving the Armstrong family tragedy.

Now, the book’s twist is famous. But here’s why it fails on screen: Poirot doesn’t really solve it so much as just stumble into it, and then he does the most un-Poirot thing imaginable — he lets them all go. He literally says, “Well, the man was evil, so the punishment fits the crime,” and brushes it off.

That’s not a satisfying mystery conclusion. It’s not justice. It’s not clever. It’s basically, “Oh, everyone’s guilty, but I’ll ignore it because the victim was bad.” It turns the entire film into a pointless exercise. The audience spends two hours watching interviews and slow interrogations, only to find out Poirot has no intention of holding anyone accountable.

Fans and critics alike called this out. The consensus was that while the visuals were gorgeous, the story felt inert, the cast underused, and the finale insulting. Instead of the big punch of “Aha! Justice is served!” it’s “Eh, everyone’s guilty, but who cares?”

And that’s why Murder on the Orient Express leaves you cold — not because of the snow, but because of how empty it feels when the train finally stops.